At around eight o’clock that night, at Lille—some two hundred kilometres northwest of Reims, where the Army of the North kept its headquarters—the camp was already pitch-black. Around the perimeter, pine-tar torches burned fiercely, pouring out thick smoke.
General Chassé swung down from his horse, and he was plainly unable to bear the stench; he coughed without pause. A gendarmerie captain hurried over with a tin canteen of fresh water and flipped the lid open. Only after the commander drank several big mouthfuls did the various discomforts in his throat ease a little.
Chassé handed the canteen back to the captain and muttered under his breath, “Damn pine tar.”
Clearly, this gendarmerie commander was used to the bright, clean coal-gas lamps at headquarters in Reims—light without any smell at all. Moreover, after more than two days of hard riding, Chassé and his party were exhausted in body and mind, sore from head to toe.
Before long, Colonel Wade—the gendarmerie commander responsible for security at the Army of the North’s headquarters—came running out to greet them. Seeing the fatigue written across Chassé’s face, he asked, “General, do you need to rest first?” Back in August, when General Brune was ordered back to the Army of the Meuse, Colonel Wade had become the Army of the North’s gendarmerie commander.
Chassé shook his head and refused the offer. “Colonel, prepare the interrogation procedure. Before midnight, I must send the result to the Reims Command Headquarters.” Then he asked, “How are things in and around the camp?”
The gendarmerie colonel stepped forward and replied in a low voice, “Everything is going very smoothly, General. As you ordered, the corps gendarmerie took firm control of headquarters last night, and the detachment that Colonel Oudinot brought back has successfully seized each key fortification in Lille’s defenses. The frontline units suspected of ties to General Fardel are presently under the tight watch of the acting corps commander, General Hoche. In addition, I can ensure that none of this has leaked. We have told the outside world only that General Fardel caught a chill while inspecting the defenses at Tournai, and is recuperating at a manor outside Lille.”
“Very good.” Chassé nodded and signaled for Wade to lead the way.
Inside the interrogation room, where the gendarmerie held prisoners under strict guard, Chassé met the Army of the North’s commander, General Fardel—now a detainee. He lay half-reclined on a campaign cot, drooping and sighing again and again. His soft bicorne was nowhere to be seen, and he looked disheveled, hair unkempt and clothing in disorder. Fardel was no longer the man who, upon first being appointed commander of the Army of the North, had been full of swaggering confidence and unrestrained delight.
When the iron door clanged open, Fardel could not help lifting his head. What he saw was the Dutch hunting dog at Marshal André’s side—and the gendarmerie commander, loyal to his master and merciless to his enemies.
There was no doubt that the order to place Fardel under soft arrest in the corps gendarmerie department could only have come from the Northern Command Headquarters. The cause lay a few days earlier: André, newly promoted to Marshal of the Republic, had received a battle report from the Namur front. In its phrasing, the report displayed nothing but the Army of the North and the Army of the Meuse cooperating and fighting bravely to win a great victory. Even so, the commander-in-chief still sensed something off between the lines, and the key problem lay with several senior commanders of the Army of the North.
Under the unified plan laid down by the supreme headquarters and the General Staff, once the Army of the Meuse had successfully annihilated the Prussian corps that had pushed deep into the heart of Champagne, the Army of the North—previously held back—was to make two different strategic arrangements along its eastern and western axes.
Simply put, the eastern column under General Hoche was to besiege the fortress of Namur on the Meuse with all its strength, cutting off the Bohemian corps’ only line of retreat, and to coordinate with the Army of the Meuse, which was driving in hard from south of the Ardennes Forest, thereby surrounding and destroying the Austrian strategic maneuver force deployed in the southern Netherlands. The aim was to end the war in the Austrian Netherlands as quickly as possible and to make full preparations in advance for the next step: an assault on the northern Netherlands.
At the same time, General Aoste, commander of the western column, was to hold the Nieuves–Wallehem–Torhout–Nieuwpoort (Atlantic) defensive line, above all by holding Nieuves and guaranteeing the eastern column’s flank and rear. Considering that the western line was too long, the Northern Command Headquarters allowed Aoste’s forces to decide, according to the battlefield situation, whether to abandon the Wallehem–Torhout–Nieuwpoort (Atlantic) line and withdraw back into France, once Austrian forces from the directions of Ghent and Brussels moved to attack.
General Berthier, Chief of the General Staff, stressed repeatedly that the strategic intent of the Army of the North was to cooperate with the Army of the Meuse to destroy the enemy’s effective strength—the Bohemian corps—and in one stroke remove the greatest obstacle to conquering the Austrian Netherlands in full. Therefore, General Aoste of the western column had to guarantee absolute security in the directions of Nieuves (also called Nièves) and Mons. That sector was the extremely thin rear area of General Hoche’s eastern column, and no mishap could be tolerated there. As for the other defensive points of the western line, if the situation turned unfavorable, even Tournai—the Frankish royal city—could be abandoned.
At the Northern Command Headquarters meeting held on August twenty-fifth, General Fardel, newly appointed commander of the Army of the North, had been dissatisfied with the General Staff’s strategic disposition for his army. He tried to lobby Commander-in-Chief André to transfer twenty to thirty thousand strategic reserves from the Soissons camp, so that the Army of the North could independently undertake the attack and occupation of the Austrian Netherlands. The commander-in-chief rejected the idea without hesitation. André emphasized throughout that corps commanders must obey, without condition, the established plan of Chief of Staff General Berthier.
Perhaps André was careless. After noticing Fardel’s discontent, he took no particular measures. And General Fardel’s negative mood was quickly exploited by the army’s plenipotentiary, Gensonné. After repeated exchanges, Fardel began to pin his hopes for the thirty thousand reinforcements at Soissons on the Brissot faction.
Several weeks later, at Brissot’s demand, and under commission from the National Convention, five deputies were sent to Soissons. Under the pretext of inspecting the recruit camp, they planned to forcibly dispatch the thirty thousand trainees there to the Army of the North. Unexpectedly, something went wrong on the way: the deputies, as if possessed, went to Reims to conduct an inspection instead, and, because of their arrogant conduct, were detained by the Reims gendarmerie. André then sued the matter to the National Convention, accusing the five of being “enemy spies.” After mediation on all sides, André and the Brissot faction finally reached a compromise. The unlucky deputies were stripped of their status as representatives on mission; after interrogation by the gendarmerie command, they were sent to a quarry for three months of forced labor.
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Those five former deputies, once interrogated by the gendarmerie, immediately confessed the Brissot faction’s scheme with Fardel and others in an attempt to reduce their own culpability. For the sake of unity within the Jacobins, André did not press the matter further. In private, he merely forced the Army of the North’s plenipotentiary, Gensonné, to resign, and sent a letter in the name of the Command Headquarters warning General Fardel not to defy the operational plan already issued by the supreme headquarters.
Plainly, Fardel did not take André’s warning to heart. The Army of the North’s conduct on the battlefield remained willful. On the very day Valmy’s victory was announced, the General Staff wired the western column under General Aoste, ordering it to protect the eastern column’s flank and rear with all its strength—that is, to guarantee absolute security in the directions of Nieuves and Mons.
Unexpectedly, General Aoste instead followed General Fardel’s plan to push north. He concentrated twelve thousand of the western column’s main force and, without authorization, launched a fierce attack on Brussels, the capital of the Austrian Netherlands, some thirty kilometres north of Nieuves. On the Austrian side, the commander of Brussels’s defenses was none other than the returned Archduke Charles of Austria. Originally, the Habsburg prince was supposed to go back to Vienna to recuperate; yet after spending a few days taking the waters at Aachen, he immediately turned his horse around, returned to Brussels, and reentered the war.
After the catastrophic defeat in the Second Battle of Tournai, Archduke Charles of Austria once again suffered the torment of illness—epilepsy. Yet none of it broke his will. On the contrary, each setback only made him more resolute. During his convalescence at the Aachen baths, he kept close watch on front-line reports of the Prusso-Austrian Coalition’s war against France. By the time the Prussian main force marched unimpeded deep into Champagne, he had already discerned, from the situation map, the terrible design the French were pursuing.
Upon returning to Brussels, Archduke Charles of Austria volunteered to serve as the city’s defensive commander. During this period, he repeatedly bypassed levels of command to ask the Bohemian corps’ lieutenant general commander, Comte de Latour, about the situation at the front. He also borrowed the name of his uncle—the governor of the Austrian Netherlands, Duc de Teschen—to send a letter urging Comte de Latour to beware a flanking envelopment by the French right wing (Hoche’s forces), as well as a surprise strike and counterattack from the direction of the Ardennes Forest.
In fact, Archduke Charles of Austria had guessed eight or nine parts out of ten of the Northern Command Headquarters’ strategic disposition on the Austrian Netherlands front. The only missing piece was that he overlooked the Meuse itself. Comte de Latour had repeatedly confirmed that, after the season of torrential rains, the French were unlikely to use the Meuse—narrow in navigable channel and steady in current—to transport supplies and troops. Even if the French forced navigation, they would fall under Austrian artillery coverage.
When he learned that fifteen thousand French troops had set out from Nieuves and were advancing on Brussels, Archduke Charles of Austria—who had only a few thousand men for defense—did not adopt the conservative posture General Aoste hoped for, namely holding the city while waiting for relief. Instead, he drew most of his forces outside the city and, using the cover of forts and bunkers along the route, conducted flexible, mobile guerrilla tactics, leaving the French repeatedly rushing from one emergency to another.
In early November, when Austrian intelligence learned from French prisoners that Nieuves was extremely hollowed out and its garrison lax, Archduke Charles of Austria executed a daring infiltration maneuver. He led more than five thousand troops out of the French encirclement and shifted the focus of attack to the rear of the French western column. At dusk, an Austrian raiding party disguised as a French detachment successfully deceived the defenders, seized the city gate, and captured all of Nieuves before nightfall.
The fall of Nieuves allowed Archduke Charles of Austria to throw the Army of the North’s rear into chaos. It not only threatened the western column’s line of retreat, but also revealed that General Hoche’s eastern column, besieging Namur, had left a salient on its flank and rear with no defensible terrain at all.
Upon learning that Nieuves had been lost, General Aoste hurriedly withdrew the western column to return in support, only to be ambushed by the outnumbered Archduke Charles of Austria. In the first shock of the Austrian attack, the western column’s commander, General Aoste, was killed in action, immediately plunging the French into a perilous situation. At that moment, the First French Volunteer Corps under Colonel Oudinot held the line. Without artillery cover, it relied on hollow square formations and, at the price of enormous casualties, successfully checked repeated cavalry charges, preventing a complete collapse across the western front.
At this very time, General Hoche knew nothing of what had happened at Nieuves, fifty kilometres away. Following the Command Headquarters’ orders, he had concentrated the eastern column’s full strength to besiege Namur and cut off the Bohemian corps’ retreat. After Archduke Charles of Austria successfully ambushed the French western column and lifted the siege of Brussels, he was not satisfied with what he had achieved. He resolved to continue marching east, to strike at the rear of the French eastern column, which was almost entirely unguarded.
Fortunately, a courier dispatched by Colonel Oudinot happened, outside Mons, to run into French engineers building a semaphore telegraph. After negotiations, the western column’s message—relayed through multiple stations—reached the eastern column’s camp under Namur before the Austrians could advance, and bought General Hoche an extremely precious two hours to adjust his dispositions.
It was those two hours that allowed General Hoche to gather the eastern column’s main forces and, near the town of Jambroux between Nieuves and Namur, block the five thousand Austrians led by Archduke Charles of Austria. In that battle, relying on French numerical superiority, Hoche all but annihilated the Austrian force; only eight hundred cavalry managed to shield the Habsburg prince and break out once again.
Even so, the sacrifice of this Austrian mobile guerrilla column was well worth it. If the semaphore telegraph had not carried warning in time, Hoche’s eastern column—more than twenty thousand men—might well have been caught under Namur between Austrian forces attacking from front and rear, and suffered a catastrophic rout. Even so, because the French failed to take the fortress of Namur in time, the Bohemian corps—driven back step by step under the Army of the Meuse’s heavy blows—found an escape corridor down the lower Meuse.
Even with three steam gunboats joining the fighting on the Meuse, and repeatedly slipping around behind Austrian blocking positions to deliver large-scale bombardment, the French still failed to keep most of the retreating Bohemian corps from getting away. On October eighth, the Austrian garrison of Namur, isolated and without relief, finally opened its gates and laid down its arms after days of relentless bombardment by more than one hundred heavy guns under Colonel Laclos, the French artillery commander.
This Meuse campaign ended as a joint victory for the Army of the North and the Army of the Meuse. Yet the two armies did not fully carry out the strategic plan of the Command Headquarters: they failed to encircle and annihilate the thirty thousand-strong Bohemian corps. They reached only a bare passing line—inflicting a severe blow, but not destruction. Nearly twenty thousand Austrian troops, under Comte de Latour, withdrew down the Meuse and successfully fell back to the fortress of Liège, some fifty kilometres to the northeast.
Although this expedition ended in another disastrous defeat for Archduke Charles of Austria, he nevertheless became a hero among Austrian soldiers. It was precisely the spirit of fearless sacrifice shown by Archduke Charles of Austria and the six thousand-strong mobile force under his command that compelled the French western front to abandon the Namur line, allowing most of the retreating Bohemian corps to escape disaster. Moreover, Archduke Charles of Austria’s sustained mobile operations also bought precious time for more than ten thousand Austrian troops in Brussels, Ghent, and other places to pull back successfully to the port of Antwerp.
